“First thing tomorrow, we’ll ask him,” Banderas promised Jack. “In the meantime, back to station. I want us all to go over every inch of data from the past three months. Let’s make sure we’re not jumping to conclusions.”
17th Merlin
“Noriko, Cameron, this is Elizabeth, our archivist,” Lizzie introduced.
“Nice to meet you,” Elizabeth greeted pleasantly, holding out a hand.
As Noriko returned the greeting, she gave the woman a quick once-over. Elizabeth was one of those people who may not have been stunningly beautiful, but instead had a particular charm that made her instantly likeable. Her curly brown hair swung at chin length, skin on the paler side from lack of sunlight, and she was dressed in the simple blue police uniform jazzed up by her stylish glasses. When she smiled, Noriko smiled back without realizing it.
“You’re Cameron?” Elizabeth asked in a searching tone. “The same one that spouted off the conspiracy theory involving lizards?”
“That’s me,” he admitted, not at all shy or defensive about it. “Easiest way to get rid of telemarketers, y’know, are conspiracy theories.”
Elizabeth’s eyes crinkled into a silent laugh. “I didn’t, actually. You will have to share some more of these theories with me so I can unleash them on the unsuspecting at will.”
“Absolutely.”
Noriko glanced between the two of them. Was she the only one wondering? “Ah, how do you know about that?”
“The security footage was mysteriously ‘leaked’ on the Net,” Elizabeth explained innocently. “We’ve all been laughing over it.”
Taking a moment to process, Noriko offered, “I take it that there are no secrets in this station?”
“None whatsoever,” Lizzie confirmed. “Elizabeth, you pulled the files for us?”
“I did,” Elizabeth confirmed and waved them to follow her. “I set everything up for you in the research room so you can work undisturbed.”
Noriko took a good look around her as they moved through the archive. It was laid out like a warehouse, but it had an archaic air and more warmth to it than she’d expected. There were hundreds of volumes of books, some large enough to be terrain maps and stored horizontally, some slim like monthly ledgers, others hidden in protective boxes and ostensibly too old to be exposed to the fluorescent lighting. Most of those that were visible were bound in stiff leather hardback, a few worn and frayed around the edges with age and use, others looking relatively new in comparison. Interspersed through the shelving were desks with computer consoles, flat wooden library tables, and holo screens set up here and there. The place was a little on the dimmer side, quiet, and had that musty smell of old paper. Noriko inhaled a deep breath and felt right at home.
“I’m surprised by all the books,” Cameron noted.
“Everyone says that,” Elizabeth grinned over her shoulder. “We’re surrounded by relics, but the truth is, books and paper can outlast the lifetimes of our children’s children, far longer than any type of digital file we’ve created so far. But in order to survive, we need the information from books and papers to be machine readable and right at our fingertips.” She wiggled her fingers for emphasis. “There are archivists all over the world scanning books and documents and digitizing audio and video recordings that date as far back as 1970, as well as those managing the databases that contain the constant influx of born-digital content. It can take some serious engineering to extract data from filmstrips, photo negatives, old music records, or ancient floppy disks. And don’t get me started on how every new technology makes our current methods obsolete.”
She opened the door to windowless private research room and gestured them inside. “Here you are!”
In the center was a wide rectangular table that could seat twelve people comfortably, with one side smooth, solid wood and the other side equipped with a state-of-the-art holo screen. From this a 3D projection lit up the room, and Noriko stepped forward and took a better look. It was a rendering of the ley lines in the immediate area. “How recent is this map?”
“A complete 3-D graph of the planet is completed every six months,” Elizabeth explained. “As different teams map out the ley lines in the field, they send the data to me and I update the graph piece by piece until a full rendition is complete. Then I save the data with a series of secure back-ups, and it becomes the master file until the next rendition is done. It’s a constant process. For your sakes, since I understand this is urgent, I merged the newest data I have with the master file. This is by far the most current graph I can offer.”
What the woman had done was a mountain of work. Noriko turned to her and said with a grateful inclination of the head, “We appreciate your hard work.”
“To itashimashite,” Elizabeth returned with a wink and a slight bow.
Noriko blinked, doing a double take. She had not expected Japanese from an obviously American woman. “You speak Japanese?” she asked in her parents’ native tongue.
“Yes, but I’m poor at it.” Elizabeth laughed, as if admitting that she was bad at the language was nothing to be ashamed about. And indeed it was not; as a non-Japanese, being able to speak it all was remarkable. “Have you met Katie from Legal, yet?”
Katie? “No, I have not.”
“She also speaks Japanese, but far better than I do. Actually she and I became friends because we both have a great love for Japan’s unique culture. You definitely need to meet her and come see us again, as we’re both always looking for someone to talk to and practice our Japanese. It would be great to have lunch sometime!”
Noriko made a note to do that. Making friends in the workplace was always important and knowing that she had common ground would ease things along. “I’ll go meet her.”
“Excellent!”
Elizabeth switched back to working mode and pointed to a stack of thin books on the table beside the holo screen projection, each with several paper bookmarks. “I did find a few documented cases of the ley lines in this area surging. Not quite in the way that Lizzie described to me, and the investigations all resulted in concrete causes, but I thought they might still prove useful. I pulled them just in case you wanted to take a look.”
“I certainly do.” Lizzie made a beeline for the stack. “If nothing else, maybe it will prove a negative. Right now we’re thinking it’s deliberate, but we need to make absolutely sure that nothing else can explain all of this.”
“Can I help with anything else?” Elizabeth checked with all three of them but got shakes of the head in response. “Then I’ll go back to work. I’ll be around here somewhere if you need me—just holler.”
“Thank you,” Lizzie called after her. “Well, she saved us quite a bit of time by setting all of this up,” she noted as she dropped into a chair.
“Yeah, she really did.” Cameron touched the holograph display and rotated it, tilting it at a different angle before peering intently. “It’s completely 3-D. It really shows where the ley lines go and how they connect, even if they go deeper into the ground rather than running along the surface.”
That was excellent. “How do we want to divvy this up? Lizzie, do you want to take the books on?”
“I do,” Lizzie confirmed, waving Noriko and Cameron on. “Why don’t the two of you mark the paths that connect. We know that our surging ley lines connect to others, but I couldn’t begin to tell at what points or how many lines. Trace them out so that I can see if any of these incident reports correlate.”
In a recessed pocket near the holo screen, there were fat stylus pens available. Noriko picked up one and twirled it idly in between her fingers as she tried to find her bearings on the map. “Let’s see. The line near the old Mojave Highway was here, I think.”
“It is. Correct.” Cameron had a stylus of his own in hand and stabbed the line, making that area glow a brighter blue. “I’ll trace it backwards if you want to go forwards.”
“Okay.” Carefully, she followed the line, making it glow as she traced it. F
or a while that was easily done as the line was a straight shot. But then other lines started to intersect it, or feed into it, and she had to mark those as well. Her progress slowed as she traced those other lines and she became completely absorbed in the task.
There was the sound of a book closing, being set aside, and then Lizzie asked, “Didn’t see anything in there, but this one mentions shenanigans at the southern Bakersfield outskirts. Any of our lines connect to those?”
“Not directly,” Cameron responded. “This one gets to the base of the mountain, not really near Bakersfield, and then veers off west. So I guess sort of in the area?”
Lizzie leaned forward enough to compare what she was reading to what Cameron was pointing at. “Nope, not close enough.”
Noriko kept tracing, but her mind wondered if this was really possible. In theory, yes, power surges in one spot could certainly affect the rest of the line. But it usually had an immediate effect. It was like any other electrical surge that way—it would be strongest near the impact point, and then grow gradually weaker as it dispersed different directions. To think that power could travel a long distance before suddenly causing havoc did not make any sense to her.
Testing the waters, she asked, “How far out should we go?”
Lizzie glanced up, saw where she had stopped, and shrugged. “I’d say that was plenty far. Maybe too far. We’re trying to find anything within a fifty-mile radius as anything further out than that is impossible.”
They agreed on that at least. Seeing that she had gone too far on this one, she switched over to the area near the weigh station and started in again. This time she marked it out straight to the fifty-mile mark and then back tracked, tracing any branching or intersecting ley lines.
The area went quiet again as they worked, and it got to the point that the rustling of a page or their own breathing became loud.
“How’s it going over here?”
Noriko nearly jumped out of her skin as Elizabeth appeared right behind her. Was the woman a ninja?! She hadn’t even heard footsteps.
“Sorry, sorry,” Elizabeth apologized, laughing. “I didn’t mean to spook you all.”
Cameron lightly thumped a hand to his heart. “Just let me get my heart back in my chest. It’s all good.”
“You get used to the quiet in here,” Elizabeth continued. Coming up to stand in between Noriko and Cameron, she took a close look at their work. “Not being a Mægen myself, I only partially followed the explanation Lizzie gave me earlier. Is this what you needed?”
“I think it is,” Lizzie assured her, “We’re just not finding the answer we wanted to find.”
Noriko—for that matter, the whole team—had known what they would find before they were even assigned to go look. She didn’t need to trace out the last ley line, the one at the Lab, to know what the answer would be.
The truth of the matter was this: there was no possible way that three ley lines could go out of control all within the same month and in the same area without them being related. And, as the saying went, once was happenstance, twice was coincidence, three times was enemy action. The whole team had known, when that last ley line had gone berserk, that the odds of this being a natural event was extremely low.
They were all hoping beyond hope that they would be able to find a reason, a natural reason, for these instances. It was why Banderas had assigned the three of them to the research room while the rest of them either helped Goudie or went to the station holo room to construct a crime scene model. But no amount of research would tell give them a different answer, not to this question. There were only two reasons why a ley line surged like these three had. Either a natural disaster happened, physically impacting the lines….
Or someone deliberately sabotaged them. It always circled back to this but no one talked about it.
“Criminal,” Cameron stated, for once not a trace of the jokester on his face.
Noriko was jarred back into the present as someone said what she was thinking. Lizzie dropped her book a few inches to stare up at him as well.
“It can’t be a natural disaster,” Lizzie agreed grimly. Shutting the book with a soft finality, she laid it back on top of the stack. “There’s no cause for it. And with something that powerful, we’d darn well be able to detect a cause. We’d feel it.”
Truly. A Mægen or Dwol was just as sensitive to merlins as a dog would be to scents, or a bird to changes in air currents. It was an occupational hazard of sorts. If there was any kind of change in their surroundings, anything that would influence the ley lines, they would feel it. Even in a dead sleep they would feel it.
“Who?” Noriko wondered aloud, not really expecting an answer, but having to voice it regardless. “I mean, who would be crazy enough? The people that have the ability to do this aren’t insane enough to want to. We go through a crap-ton of psych evals to make sure of that. So who in their right minds would be doing it here?”
“I really wish I had an answer to give you, but it’s probably not our department to figure this out,” Lizzie responded wearily. “Our job is to figure out if someone else should be investigating this properly, and I think we have the answer to that.” Lizzie lifted the radio band to her mouth and stated clearly, “Captain.”
“Here. What did you find?”
“Nothing even remotely natural to explain this. All three of them had to have been the work of someone.”
There was a long, weary sigh. “I was hoping…. Alright, good work. Clean up and return to the office. You’re still on duty for the next…ah, forty-five minutes and then you can call it quits and go home.”
“Roger that, Cap.”
18th Merlin
“Spiiiiiidey.” Scratch, scratch, scratch. “Spiiiiidey, you home?”
Noriko, still with her hair wet from a late shower, stomped to her own door and yanked it open. There in the doorway was her partner, looking as lackadaisical as usual, an e-reader in his hands and a bakery box of some kind tucked in his arm. “Cameron Powers, why are you scratching at my door like some cat that wants to be let in?”
“Because I tried knocking and you didn’t answer?” he responded, as if that was the most natural and obvious reason in the world.
“I was in the shower,” she riposted, beyond exasperated. She did appreciate that he hadn’t used her password to just barge in, though, even though he knew it. “Now, what do you want?”
“We got midterms soon, but I can’t study. I need someone to quiz me.”
Understandable and reasonable. Noriko actually needed a study session herself with someone else as the material was getting stale and hard to retain. “And that box?”
“It’s cake. I thought this was a Japanese thing, to eat sweet things when you’re tired.”
It was also true that she was tired. Of course, she had every right to be. In the past three weeks, she had moved across the country, started a new job, and then got thrown into a very intense investigation. “We’ve only got two hours until we need to report for our shift.”
“Two hours a day is better than trying to cram everything in last minute.”
“You do make a point.” She waved him inside. “Want spring rolls? I was going to make some for a late lunch.”
“Sounds good,” he agreed. “These Japanese?”
“Vietnamese. I had a friend teach me how.” Noriko waved him to the couch, which he largely ignored. He set his e-reader and box down on the table and instead followed her to the kitchen.
Since he seemed intent to stick with her, she put the ingredients for the sauce out on the counter and squirted a large amount of Hoisin sauce into a small pan. “Stir this slowly. When it gets hot enough, add a heaping spoonful of peanut butter.”
He took up the whisk she handed him readily and started stirring. “You make your own sauce too?”
“Half the fun of eating spring rolls is the sauce.” Noriko didn’t have to make the rest of the ingredients—they were already in the fridge. She just pulled out
the containers, the rice paper, and filled a large bowl with water. Dipping the rice paper in it, she then laid it flat on a plate and loaded it full of goodies before rolling it up tightly. “How many do you want? I should warn you, they’re rather filling.”
“Three? If I want more than that, I’ll wrap my own. I think I know how after watching you do it.”
It’s true that this wasn’t rocket science. Their simplicity was one of the reasons why Noriko made them so often. “Is the sauce hot?”
“Adding in the peanut butter.”
“Pour some of the coconut soda in there too. Not much, say two tablespoons worth.”
He did as she directed, and Noriko felt rather impressed that he knew how to follow those directions. Her brothers were notorious for messing even simple instructions up. “Don’t let it boil. Once it’s hot and mixed, it’s done.”
“Okay.”
She reached for two sauce bowls, handed them over, then carried their plates over to her small coffee table. To make up for lack of chairs, she pulled out two thick cushions from the stack in the corner and placed them near the table.
Cameron plopped down on one like he had sat this way his entire life, legs crossed and off to the side. A grin on his face, he dipped a roll liberally into the sauce and ate with obvious pleasure. “You’re a good cook, Spidey.”
“Cameron, if you consider this cooking, we’re in trouble.”
He grinned at her, mouth full, and didn’t try to deny it.
Noriko only ate two rolls, as she was saving room for the cake. With them done, she popped up and fetched plates and forks from the kitchen before returning. When she flipped open the box lid, she sat and stared at it for a panic-stricken moment. “Is today your birthday?”
“Nope. Mine’s in September.”
Phew. Wait. “It’s not your birthday. But you bought birthday cake.”
“The cake won’t know.”
Rolling her eyes, she translated, “In other words, all they had available was birthday cake.”
Call to Quarters (A Gaeldorcraeft Forces Novel Book 1) Page 17